The FBI might shut off the internet for millions on March 8, 2012 in an attempt to rid the country’s Internet infrastructure of the DNS Changer Trojan.
We’re going to show you how to check to see if your computer is infected, but first we’re going to tell you a little about why this is happening.
The DNS Changer Trojan originated in Estonia and might have infected at least a half-million computers in the United States. It has been found on the computers at half of the Fortune 500 companies and on computers at 27 government agencies. The Trojan changes an infected computer’s DNS settings to send users to fraudulent and malevolent websites. The Trojan is has another twist too — it prevents you from visiting security websites that could diagnose or remove the infection. The group authorities suspect are behind the Trojan have been arrested, the FBI and the Estonian government and not been able to kill the Trojan’s botnet.
It’s really simple to see if your computer is infected with the DNS Changer Trojan just visit this site. The site will run a simple check on your computer to see if your computer is okay or infected.
I just checked my computer and I’m not infected. See?
To learn more about checking your computer for this Trojan check out the DNS Changer Working Group and the FBI. [Krebs on Security via BetaBeat via Geekosystem]
WOW! Thanks for the tip! Good to know I’m safe.
Thanks for the link. Scarey things going on.
Ditto above
Juel
is this only going to affect the USA or all internet users
I don’t think the FBI has any authority anywhere else. Check with your local version of the FBI.
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I haven’t seen anything about this from news or radio. Thanks for keeping all of us protected.
Thanks for ALL your great tips and work. Love this one! I’m good
Thank you for this. Glad everyone was ok above.
What would you do if you cannot access your Google Apps data on March 8th? We are backing up our data with a company called SysCloudSoft that offers on premise backup at just $399. You can access all your data offline and view emails in Outlook/Thunderbird. They also offer a free Google Apps backup for all personal users. I backed up Gmail,Google Docs,Contacts,Sites and my Google Calendar – http://www.syscloudsoft.com
I really you could solve that problem a lot cheaper than $399.00. You can test your computers free on the site mentioned in the article. First, you can download all your docs from Google Docs at anytime. To do so, select all docs on one page — and click “More” then “Download”. Google will zip up all your docs and you can download them to your computer. All files stay in the same format as they are on Google Docs. And there are many other backup/sync tools what allow you to save Google Docs to Skydrive (25GB free space), DropBox (2GB Free Space) and SugarSync 5GB of free space. The easiest way is just to download Google Docs to your computer — set a reminder on Google Calendar to remind you to do it
Remember DNS Changer Malware isn’t going to affect Google Docs. They’ll still be there even if your computer is infected. But while there maybe millions of computers infected there are over 1 billion computers on the Internet — so perhaps a few out of a thousand computer may be infected — or it may be less. I wouldn’t worry about Google Docs access because of a Trojan you probably don’t have. You can check your computer anytime – or as many computers as you need to check in a very short time.
I’ve had several people contact me that this is not true. One of them has a daughter who works for the FBI. Her daughter says it isn’t true. Another said that this website is owned by the government, and when you go there to check your computer out that it’s a way for the government to get your ISP number. But in my thinking if the government wanted to get your ISP number they could do it any time. The reason I say that is I watch Forensic Files and they had a case where the police tracked down a killer who had printed out a map on the internet. They were able to get his ISP number verifying the date and time he printed it. Another person said if this is true why haven’t they announced it in the news. So now I don’t know what to believe. Maybe you could check it out further.